Extra special Chicago-steeped jazz

Recalling Fred Anderson, with a summer series in his memory

Let’s celebrate the late Chicago tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, a memorable, original voice, a music-community builder and gentle strong man who ran the Velvet Lounge for 38 years, generating waves of upcoming musicians who maintain today’s high standards of all-in, radically “free” improvised music.

Fred Anderson, tenor saxophone, at Velvet Lounge #2; photo © Lauren Deutsch

Why now? The Birdhouse, the non-profit Anderson founded in 1977, has announced its 15th annual series of free, outdoor, early evening concerts in his honor, mostly in the small, near-South Side Park bearing his name. The first of six shows is Friday, August 8, as per details followed by the pdf of my interview with Anderson, published in Musician magazine circa 1980.

The Anderson/Birdhouse series is especially welcome this year, as the City of Chicago has further abbreviated the Labor Day weekend Chicago Jazz Festival after failing to announce its lineup until July 1. That late date has limited promotion to potential out-of-town fans, who have plenty of options (same weekend: Detroit International Jazz Fest, DC Jazz Festival, Jazz Aspen Snowmass, etc.). In its post-pandemic iterations the 45-year-old Chicago fest has suffered a reduced footprint (one less stage, one less evening of performances), and arguably a measure of its programmatic daring.

It’s as if the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, exerting more if not better influence on the schedule formerly curated by an independent Jazz Institute of Chicago committee, would prefer commercial events like the NASCAR street race and Lollapalooza speak for the city and dominate downtown than local culture via our beloved summer Jazz, Blues, House Music and Gospel fests.

To be fair, downtown Millennium Park also hosts a cross-genre Summer Music Series and a Classical Music Series. And the Chicago Jazz Fest includes sets I won’t miss by keyboard Amina Claudine Myers, quintets led by cellist Tomeka Reid and tenor sax veteran Billy Harper, younger tenor firebrand James Brandon Lewis, always engaging singer René Marie, and trumpeter Eddie Henderson, who is rarely here. Serious jazz.

Still, DCASE should not be so modest. Maybe it’s affected by Second City-itus, as Midwestern artists often are, about the music here. Chicago boasts a remarkably fertile, unusually heterogenous and impossible to encompass music culture. In the week prior to the Jazz Festival there are pop-up music events in many neighbordhoods. Such as the series devoted to Fred Anderson.

Anderson himself was personally modest, yet his music spoke loud and clear. “Little Fox Run” from Song For, recorded in 1966, issued as Joseph Jarman’s album, is a prime example of what scholar Paul Steinbeck identifies as “mutuality” — freedom within structure, individual and ensemble passion, allowing for and embracing complexity, forging a dramatic, dynamic whole.

An ardent member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music, which emphasized the DIY ethic, Anderson was such a believer in what he was doing that he founded places to play for others to hear, such as like the Unitarian Church coffee house in Evanston where, as a high school student, I discovered this world; the short-lived and cop-harassed but well-remember Birdhouse on Chicago’s North Sid3, where Gen 2 AACM members honed their chops, and the Velvet Lounge, near-South near Chinatown, in its two locations serving as Chicago’s full-time new improv clubhouse.

Anderson never did much touring, he preferred staying home with his family, although the first recording under his name is from the 1978 Moers festival.

Fred Anderson onstage — with Billy Brimfield, George E. Lewis, Brian Smith, Hamid (Hank) Drake, Moers, Germany, 1978/photo Herr Sharif, Flickr

He may not be famous outside Chicago and “free jazz” circles, but deserves be known as a rugged individualist akin to Pharoah Sanders and Peter Brotzmann, a predecessor of David S. Ware and Kamasi Washington, a peer of Charles Gayle, confrere of Von Freeman and New Orleans’ Kidd Jordan.

Anderson mentored and collaborated with many, many no-holds-barred players, some staying close to home, others now international. Among them: trumpeter Brimfield, composer-historian-scholar-trombonist Lewis, multi-instrumentalist Douglas Ewart, pianist Adegoke and singer Iqua Colson, flutist Nicole Mitchell, saxophonists Chico Freeman, Ken Vandermark, Dave Rempis, Fred Jackson, Isaiah Collier, cellist Tomeka Reid, bassists Harrison Bankhead and Joshua Abrams, vocalist Dee Alexander, pianist Jim Baker, percussionists Hamid Drake, Adam Rudolph, Michael Zerang and Mike Reed. A lifesize portrait of Fred by photographer Michael Jackson hangs over the bar at Reed’s venue Constellation.

Fred Anderson outside Velvet Lounge #1, photo by Michael Jackson

And though The Velvet Lounge is long gone, its mission is advanced by such venues as the new music loft Elastic Arts, presenting space Experimental Sound Studio, the dive bar the Hungry Brain, the Extraordinary Popular Delusions sessions weekly at the Beat Kitchen. Anderson influences the philosophies of the Hyde Park Jazz Society and Hyde Park Jazz Festival, trumpeter Orbert Davis’ Chicago jazz Philharmonic, and the grass-roots South Side Jazz Coalition.

As for the 15th annual Birdhouse Series at the near-South Side Fred Anderson Park:

5 pm FRI AUG 9   Heliacal Rising of Sothis — multi-instrumentalist and Elastic Arts director Adam Zanolini’s tribute to another Chicago cultural influences, Kelan Phil Cohran.

5 pm FRI AUG 16  Marquette Park Composers Workshop — from its promotion: “combines poetry and music to bring you on an exciting musical journey . . . reflect[ing] on classical and modern visions of the apocalypse.”

6 pm MON AUG 19  Damon Locks & Ken Vandermark - Vandermark’s saxophone sound is one of the biggest, gruffest, thorniest, in Fred Anderson’s thrall. Damon Locks — well, what to make of him? We all wonder. That’s a good thing.

5 pm FRI AUG 23   Gustavo Cortiñas’ Jam Out in the Parks — The Mexican-born, New Orleans-educator drummer-philosopher, will also be heard at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival Sept. 24.

6 pm SUN AUG 25   Ex Ibex (Pennepalli, Keller, Hernandez, Chan, Diethrich) — this clip from last December gives a taste.

6 pm WED AUG 28   Chris Greene Quartet — Tenor saxophonist Greene, based in Evanston as Fred Anderson was, has a new album out: Conversance on the Pravda Records, a jazz first for the indie-rock label.

Thu, Mar 7, 2:06 PM

to me